New Tool Draws from Extensive Library of LEDs, Drivers and Heat Sinks to Create Complete Systems up to 100,000 Lumens in Minutes.
National’s LED Architect helps a designer navigate some of the more subtle aspects of solid state lighting to produce a highly highly-optimized design in a fraction of the time it takes to do by hand. To start, the designer enters desired light output (lumens) and adjusts the design with a so-called “WEBENCH Optimizer Dial”. This feature allows you to perform real-time trade-offs, based on size, conversion efficiency and cost. Once the design is tweaked to your liking, WEBENCH has a feature that allows you order to components for prototyping, share the complete system with others, or easily print a complete project report including schematics, bill of materials (BOM) and performance characteristics. In many cases, the prototype parts kit you get from National even includes a ready-to-stuff PCB. The video below will give you a good sense of what you can do with the new LED-oriented extensions of WEBENCH.

Truth be told, WEBENCH was supporting solid-state lighting apps long before LED Architect hit the scene this week. In fact, I actually used the tool a couple of years back to design a power supply to drive one of Avago’s Moonstone LED arrays for a solid-state desk lamp I was building. At that time, the tools available were more generic, but they did let me quickly come up with a fairly good design for a constant-current supply, albeit with only a rudimentary thermal analysis and none of the bells and whistles that would optimize it for an LED driver. But even back then WEBENCH platform lived up to most of National’s claims. I’d just caution that probably still takes a bit of experimenting to get the most out of WEBENCH’s many features but there is a fairly active user community that will help you come up the learning curve quickly.   

LED design novices and experts alike will find a lot to like about the solid-state lighting resources that National Semiconductor’s added to their powerful WEBENCH design tool. It encapsulates a lot of the deep analog design experience that was part of National’s culture until a frighteningly large fraction of their senior technical staff was laid off in 2009 by their now-ex-CEO, Brian Halla. In fact, WEBENCH was one of the things that helped National survive Halla’s numerous missteps, gaffes, and frequent displays of podiatric marksmanship. By making it quick and easy to tailor a design to your precise requirements, National should help many of its existing power parts find homes in today’s designs. It remains unclear however, whether the company can recover from Halla’s decimation of its technical talent pool in time to produce the next generation of LED driver products to compete with the more integrated and application-specific offerings beginning to emerge from competitors like Fairchild, Maxim, and Power Integrations. Given the still-formidable pool of talent remaining at National and their newfound focus on green power applications, I’m cautiously optimistic that they will be up to the challenge.

For more information on National’s WEBENCH LED Architect, click here.